Yes, he certainly has!
The 3 of us (Matt was just as busy as Dave and I googling for solutions) were definitely going through a grueling ordeal, but in the end it wasn't any of us who fixed it. It was the Oracle DBA we managed to snag.
We were the expectant fathers pacing frantically outside the delivery room (well, I was *in* the delivery room) for a terribly long time. The DBA made the delivery. If not for him, we'd probably still be down and I'd be pulling all-nighters implementing Plan B: Finish a bare-bones version of Dev, which has all the data anyway, and put it into production as the replacement.
The Dev version is coming along well enough that we're going to do something similar anyway. The new webserver will be ordered Monday (Dell, yet again, didn't get all the specs right on the one I told them I want -- maybe I'd better spec it out online) and everyone at the office has been put on notice that unless they or one of the sites is on fire, I'm not to be disturbed, and we're going to see just how far along I can get the thing.
Only the receptionist/bookkeeper was present Monday and she told everyone who called that I was unavailable. My productivity on the new site was amazing, as Dave can attest. He was watching modules come to life in realtime.
Though having a competent assistant/bookkeeper and an increasingly competent assistant programmer (she now has full charge of the advertising system) does reduce my interruptions, it's still tough to get things done when one is both programmer and manager. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that only 20% of my time being occuppied by non-programming activities takes away a good 80% of my productivity as a programmer.
So next week the only hat I'll be wearing is the propeller beanie and we'll see what I can do with 5 days in a row of 100% productivity as a programmer.
I like to manage expectations and keep them nice and low so I have a better chance of meeting them, but if I tell all you good folks what my goal is for the week, it'll help keep me working at a more frantic clip.
My goal is that by the end of the week or when our new webserver arrives, whichever comes later, we will throw the switch and the Dev site will go online as SI's new message board system with links back to this site for things it won't initially (if ever) support, such as portfolios.
I'm not talking bare-bones, though. I won't force all of us onto the new system until all or nearly all of the existing messaging-specific features of the current site are duplicated there with very few possible exceptions (preview/spellcheck comes immediately to mind, as does Filtering/Ignore).
For those who haven't seen it yet, the new version is a hybrid of what I feel are the best elements of Classic, Heritage (as we call the "new SI") and iHub. Heavy emphasis on Classic's simplicity of layout (though not remotely similar in layout -- this one's even simpler), Heritage's depth of features and (IMO) better-looking interface, and iHub's "gee-whiz" stuff like it's ability to display menu items as "buttons" (the default layout in Dev) and, most of all, features we have on iHub that we've never had here. An example being Read_Person, which is the last thing I'd started working on Monday, which allows you to click a PeopleMarked person's new message count, and read all their messages sequentially, regardless of the board they're on.
I expect to have all of those functional by Friday, including the "extras" lifted from iHub.
So now that I've told you, the pressure is on to produce.
I'm in constant contact with Dave during the day, so perhaps he'll give occasional progress reports as new features get finished.
Also, there's the matter of encrypted passwords in this version of SI. Though we've made efforts to unencrypt them (specifically, storing your password separately and unencrypted when you log in), there are bound to be many people who haven't had to log in since this was implemented, thanks to their cookies.
The Dev version of SI has only the passwords it copied from this version, and no decryption method for the encrypted ones. Meaning if your password is encrypted, you'll have to use the encrypted one to log in on Dev.
To help reduce the number of people who may find themselves unable to log in to Dev, I will soon have the system PM each user (on this site) the password they'll need for Dev, and will make sure there's a mechanism for users changing their own passwords on the new site.
One last thing (I think). Folders. The problem with folders isn't their "overuse". The problem is that most (estimating 80%) of the 19.2 million folder entries on this system are for messages that the site has sent to people, usually from the "Silicon Investor" account. Over 10 million of them still are in the folder for the Inbox. And will never be read because now we know that potentially as many as 250,000 "members" of the site aren't really. They're members of other Go2Net or InfoSpace properties and their accounts were mirrored onto all GNET/INSP sites.
It's these folder links we're deleting, which will take the folder_links table down to a more manageable size, able to be imported in minutes instead of hours.
Even if someone who receives a lot of PM's keeps them all filed, we don't consider that any kind of abuse of the system. Heck, that's what it's there for. Use it!
Oh, and when I did get the folder_links table pared down to 15 million rows (by zapping quite a few Trash entries and some of the system-generated ones), it was still occupying 480-meg of space. A lot of it because it has a "date_filed" field which has never been used. One thing we're going to try this weekend, after paring down the folder_links table, is removing that field and seeing if anything breaks. It probably will break something and we'll have to put it back in, but if it turns out the system works without that field, we'll be able to save quite a bit of size on that file, making imports even faster.
I don't know if the Oracle guy (no, Brad's a SQL Server guy, like me) has already zapped the system-generated folder links, but if he hasn't and you want to save a copy of a message from the "Silicon Investor" account, you'll probably want to move it to a different folder immediately. We're not zapping all folder links for such messages. Only the ones that're in folder 1 (InBox). And if you don't get your copy filed, no worries there either. I have a list of the message numbers of each of these system-generated messages and it'd be relatively easy for me to make them publicly available on the new site. They're actually a very interesting read. Like the one in May of 2003 warning that the site would be down for maintenance the weekend of the 19th <evil grin>. |
